Pro-Trump artists complain of YouTube censorship

As for Villa, her “Make America Great Again” song on YouTube was peppered with negative comments, just a few weeks after it was first posted. YouTube then sent her a cease and desist letter telling her she had to remove someone from her video. Youtube did not specify the identify of the person who filed the complaint.

On Saturday, Villa told her followers on Twitter that YouTube was threatening to remove her music video, ostensibly for privacy violations. She tweeted, “YouTube is censoring views on @KayaJones video, yesterday it was 60K now it's 53k. What the hell? 😭😭😭NOW My MAGA video has been taken down!”

“Kay Jones and I are CENSORED on YouTube for being Pro America!” wrote Villa on Twitter.

Villa also tweeted a copy of the email YouTube sent to her, warning her that she had 48 hours to edit the content in her video. Failure to comply, warned YouTube, may mean removal of the video. Villa wrote: “I personally video'd each beautiful American in my #MAGA video and personally was granted verbal AND written permission to use them.”

After she decided to upload her video again on YouTube, she tweeted: “I put it back up. I refuse 2 be silenced! Make America Great Again!” Villa told The Blaze that she had received written and verbal consent from everyone in the video. The video, she told The Blaze, had been on YouTube for several weeks without controversy.

Jones tweeted, “Please don't censor my [YouTube] views, which are moving up and down magically & use my following to push [fellow pop singer] Katy [Perry]. Not cool!” According to Villa, Jones’ video views have “systematically decreased over the last 2 days, with no explanation.” On Saturday, Jones wrote on Twitter, “Last night’s views to this morning moving up and down magically & pushing Katy's new video. Wow you guys are real low. Pathetic.”

Jones told The Blaze that her “What the Heart Don’t Know” video registered more than 62,000 views on August 18, but it has dropped as low as 53,000. She believes that the views should be as high as 100,000. She claimed that YouTube is censoring her content by “manipulating and changing the algorithm towards my views” while recommending pop-singer Katy Perry. Saying that YouTube moves Perry up in the queue of videos on the provider, Jones claimed that YouTube also funds Perry, who has 200 million viewers.

According to Villa, some YouTube subscribers claim that they are not seeing her videos in their feeds. Even though subscriber count has continually increased, Villa said her views have declined from 20,000 per week to 2,000 per week.

In a statement to The Blaze, YouTube (which is owned by Google) declared that viewcounts are important, and that the services takes action against views that are “generated in a manner that is not compliant with our policies,” which includes artificially inflated viewcounts. Also, YouTube said that it notifies video uploaders to see if want to “remove, edit, or blur material” in their videos before a review is completed.

Villa and Jones are not the only YouTube users to complain. For example, the pro-Trump duo known as Diamond and Silk claimed in early August that 95 percent of their videos had been demonetized.